Before I talk about LiveChat for your website, I wanted to mention the next Hats Club event. The event is November 14th at 4pm and will be hosted at Apex Business Advisors (the Darth Vader building at College and Metcalf.) I’m going to be on a panel talking about local businesses giving back to the community. It’s good timing because Thanksgiving will be right around the corner! Please consider coming to the event for networking, food, and hopefully some good conversation about giving back. For more info or to sign up, use this link. I would love to see you there!

LiveChat for your Website

I was working with my friends at Kenton Brothers recently, and one of the goals was to implement a chat feature on their website.

Kenton Brothers installs and supports commercial security systems… everything from key card locking hardware to video surveillance, turnstiles, and more. This involves a bunch of technology that has to work well together (they call it the security pyramid). And ongoing support is an important part of the security relationship. As a result, having an easy to use chat feature on their website became a priority.

David Strickland and I did some research and determined that LiveChat is one of the most popular and feature-rich chat systems available. The Kenton Brothers website is powered by WordPress, so we downloaded and installed the LiveChat plugin made for WordPress. We had it set up and configured in about an hour. And we were impressed. They’ve really thought of everything.

Hybrid 24/7 Support

Chat will be available on every page of the website in the lower right hand corner. (I say “will be” because they are doing internal training on using the chat support tools before turning it on. It should be up and running soon.) LiveChat is an intelligent system… in other words, it says “Chat” whenever Kenton Brothers staff is logged in and ready to take a chat request. If nobody is logged in, the chat box turns into a “Leave a Message” box. If someone leaves a message, it turns into a service ticket within the LiveChat system to be addressed the next time an employee logs in.

Canned Responses

The chat system is familiar, just like sending text messages on a phone. And from a support perspective, there are lots of bells and whistles that make it efficient for your team to use… including canned responses to common questions. You can set up canned responses with text and even links to pages or PDFs on your website for more information. This becomes really helpful if you get a lot of the same questions. And from a sales support perspective, it’s great because you can respond with links to product data sheets, pricing information, case studies and more without typing it all up every time.

Rating Surveys

Another nice feature is immediate feedback. Whenever a chat session is complete, you can ask for feedback. From a simple thumbs up or down graphic to a short list of quick yes/no questions (all configurable), you can see if your support is effective. And you can do so over time with the LiveChat reporting tools.

Integrations

And when I said they’ve thought of everything, that includes the little details like customizing the look of the chat window so the colors match your website perfectly. And there are plenty of integrations with other systems. For Kenton Brothers, we connected LiveChat with MailChimp so that people can opt-in to get the KB email newsletter. If a visitor checks the box, they are automatically added to the appropriate list in MailChimp. This works because the visitor has to provide their name and email to start a chat session. Once the chat is complete, a transcript of the chat is sent to the visitor’s email address. So you have their email address if they opt-in for your newsletter.

LiveChat is an excellent way to provide helpful support on your website for your clients and prospects. You need to be able to dedicate the resources internally to respond to those requests… But it seems to me that you would want to dedicate those resources to be responsive. And I think it makes a lasting first impression. Something good happens in our brains when we go to a website of a company that has real, live people ready to help with sales or support questions.

If adding chat to your website sounds interesting, be sure to check out LiveChat’s website for features and pricing. And no, this isn’t a sponsored blog post… I just really like their system!